[lbo-talk] "healing process"

Chuck Grimes cagrimes42 at gmail.com
Wed Apr 24 18:19:45 PDT 2013


You are missing the point. That student government got this to an open vote is a win in a long standing battle between student groups at UCB, that reflects the larger battle against the US and Israel.

Of course it is meaningless in direct action outcomes. It remains a symbolic gesture. Unfortunately places like Berkeley, Madison, et al are sometimes good at symbolic gestures and not much else.

There is another level of contention to the resolution and that is whether or not the ASUC senate controls how ASUC funds are spent and in this case invested. At a guess, there is probably a committee with administration oversight that can control that power if it wants to. This level showed up now and again in yore and included who could speak on campus and who couldn't. The ASUC is an alternate source of funding for speakers and entertainment gigs.

It occurred to me that if progressive student groups wanted to really get a bang for their bucks, they could have scheduled a series or panel of speakers ranging from Norman Finkelstein to Shlomo Sand to deconstruct the heroic myths of Israel and Zionism. As I learned from studying Weimar, it is a very old fracture that attempts to weld together an identity that Jewish equals Zionism equals Israel.

I'd like to add several academics who would include radical anthropologists and sociologists to illuminate the entire formative process of national identities and their universal fabrications. The identity formation process taps into some sort of psyche bound propensity toward tribalism. This prehensility is how we grasp and creat the social and ourselves as social beings.

While that view seems far removed from more concrete issues, I would argue it is at the core of the problem, which is manifest in the historical-legal concept of citizenship. This concept is almost universally constructed on exclusion through a whole state apparatus, just to filter out who eventually ends up in a room with the flag and can take an oath of allegiance. The last thing that a state wants is a open inclusive apparatus.

CG



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list